Stock markets soared to end the day Wednesday, bouncing back from earlier in the week to add to volatility.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose more than 600 points, or just less than 4 percent, to near its highest level of the week at 16,288.
The S&P 500 also finished up roughly 4 percent. That was the biggest one-day gain since November 2011, according to Bloomberg.
U.S. markets have seen wild swings in the last week in the wake of negative news regarding Chinese markets and economic growth.
Altogether, stocks in the Standard &Poor’s 500 index are now down just 1.5 percent on the week, after swooning by roughly 4 percent to start Monday morning.
The market swings prompted a top Federal Reserve official to say Wednesday morning that the case has been weakened for the central bank to raise interest rates and begin tightening monetary policy at its September meeting.
“The decision to begin the normalization process at the September [monetary policy] meeting seems less compelling to me than it was a few weeks ago,” said Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley at a press conference in New York City.
Economists had expected that the Fed would raise rates at its September meeting, but that expectation has changed amid the problems stemming from overseas and the dramatic movements in asset markets.
Dudley’s words may have reassured investors, who also got good news Wednesday in the form of a better-than-expected report on durable goods orders from the Census Bureau. Orders for big-ticket items such as electronics, vehicles, and aircraft grew 2.0 percent to $241.1 billion for July, defying Wall Street’s expectations for orders to shrink.
Even though economic data on output and jobs has been consistent throughout the year, U.S. markets have been thrown into wild swings in recent weeks following the People’s Bank of China’s decision to devalue the yuan in the face of a massive market sell-off, prompting fears about the health of the overall Chinese economy.
